Consumers Decide: Love It or Don't Buy It

Nowadays, many consumers are leveraging the World Wide Web to find product reviews before they make purchases.

In fact, one eMarketer study even notes that consumer reviews are 12 times more trusted than product information or descriptions that are provided by businesses. This means that in order to succeed on the web, retailers should be aware of the social sentiment that is buzzing around their products.

One way this can be done is with Decide.com, which is a shopping site that aims to help consumers make better purchasing decisions. The company recently launched a new feature called Decide Score, which analyzes ratings and reviews from across the Web, including 7,000 expert reviews and two million user reviews from sites like Amazon and Best Buy, in order to provide consumers with reliable product recommendations.

The Decide Score is displayed as a 1-100 rating, and enables consumers to easily identify the best and worst products available in each category. The beta version of the score currently appears on 22,000 consumer electronics and appliance products across 16 categories. The best part about the product scores is that it is very easy for consumers to tell what each score means, because the four categories of scores are pretty self explanatory – We Love It, We Like It, You Can Do Better and Don't Buy It. It is also important to note that if the product recommendation is "We Love It" or "We Like It," Decide provides consumers with confidence in purchasing the item. However, if the recommendation is "You Can Do Better" or "Don't Buy It," the company offers alternative suggestions of similarly priced products with a better score.

Decide also launched "Buy" and "Wait" price predictions in three new areas – Tools and Hardware, Lawn and Garden Products and Sports and Outdoor Equipment. This feature tells consumers when it is a good time to buy a product, based on potential price drops or increases.

"Decide leverages big data to make complex shopping decisions easy for consumers" says Mike Fridgen, CEO of Decide.com. "First we introduced when to buy predictions and today we take an important step towards becoming the next-generation consumer advocate by releasing data-driven what to buy recommendations."

It is always important to monitor your brand or business's reputation on the Web, so although this is a consumer-focused tool, it could definitely provide some merchants with valuable insights into how their products are being received by the general public.